[armchairhacker]

HN is social media. Social media is a spectrum.

You can imagine HN like a documentary channel compared to Facebook’s reality TV, but even “documentaries” can be dopamine sinks that aren’t actually informative (or accurate).

(But personally, I see lots of short and pure opinion posts here, documentaries are long and at least pretend to contain facts; so I’d hesitate to compare it to a documentary channel even with the caveat.)

[trollbridge]

I've never appreciated the low-effort handwaves of claiming that HN, old-school Internet forums, USENET, etc. are "social media", simply because they aren't. HN's primary medium is text, often headlined by a link to some other site. That isn't social media. HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than "social media".

Many other Internet forums are similar--they might technically have the capability, but the prevailing culture might be that people rarely do it.

Adding to this is that HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention. That makes it fundamentally different from other social media platforms today.

[crystal_revenge]

I'm going to guess you're young enough that you don't remember when HN first appeared?

For anyone that was an adult in the "web 2.0" days it's hard not to see HN as "social media". The first wave of social media sites where defined by community news aggregators that allowed commenting and, most important, up voting of comments and submissions. Digg, Reddit, HN, del.icio.us (though it lacked formal 'up voting') were all part of this first wave of social media.

The absolute key differentiator between HN and an old school internet forums, that absolutely makes it "social media", is that the community votes on your opinion and users have some way to score against each other. This is precisely the mechanism that is at the root of all problems in social media: you get a measurable reward for your content that pressures you towards saying things and sharing content that increases that reward.

Perhaps one of the best decisions HN ever made, which fights this somewhat, is removing the upvote count from being visible to other members of the community (this was not the case in the early days of HN). But for anyone that saw the rise of "social media" it's hard to imagine HN not fitting that description.

[rcoveson]

I'm very confused by this comment. The era you're talking about is also the era that Facebook was released and it didn't have a voting system, not even likes/reactions. But that's when the term "social networking" really took off, and it definitely referred to Facebook and not Digg or Reddit or Slashdot, to name another that has a comment voting system.

"Social media" as a term comes even later, to capture Twitter and the social features of YouTube and other stuff like that. But it's all sites where most users are people using real names and real faces, and users generally produce content themselves and follow each other's content.

There's clearly a cluster there and HN/Slashdot/Reddit/Digg are clearly outside it. An umbrella that covers both HN and Facebook is almost meaningless; it's "all websites with user-generated OR user-supplemented content."

[Karrot_Kream]

There were many attempts at this time to figure out how to scale forums. The bottleneck on forums and chatrooms was always human moderation. But a forum could only get so many mods and mods eventually burned out because moderation just really sucks. Moreover quality between forums was quite variable. One forum on Beets might be good, but the forums on Fantasy novels was run terribly and full of flamewars. Having a large social site of good quality would be a lot easier to manage than 30 different sites of varying quality.

Gaia Online was famously a large forum with a huge moderation staff, and the sheer amount of effort that went to running Gaia Online was incredible, and despite that it was popularly thought of as being a pretty low quality forum.

Reddit tried the upvote and downvote. HN tried upvotes only. 4chan tried full anonymity (rather than the pseudonymity of forums/usenet.) Facebook tried real names. Tumblr had the reblog (which became quote tweets when Twitter took the feature and is widely thought of now as a fairly controversial feature due to toxicity it can produce.) Twitter tried hashtags for discovery. It was a period of experimenting with how to build social spaces.

[Karrot_Kream]

> I'm going to guess you're young enough that you don't remember when HN first appeared?

FWIW this site has an older demographic and I doubt that's the reason. More likely most people weren't aware of HN until recently. It only started populating in Google search results recently. My guess is most people these days stumble upon HN by seeing a search result, or a Reddit or Twitter comment mentioning HN. A lot of people only got exposed through social media with things like Facebook and Twitter and never socialized on the internet before that.

Agree with you on everything else. It was obvious at the time that HN was part of a wave of social media along with Reddit, 4chan, Digg, Kuro5hin, etc. At that time moderation was seen as a crucial bottleneck on scaling a social site and upvotes were meant to be an innovation that helped scale these sites bigger than the forums and Usenet lists of yore. Turns out that the true revolution in scale didn't come until things like Facebook and Twitter.

[trumpdong]

The "media" part of "social media" doesn't refer to what computer techies call "media files" (music, pictures and video) but to a mechanism of communication.

[armchairhacker]

HN has comments which are social media. I don’t get why people care, because social media isn’t intrinsically bad; I always say “mainstream social media” or “toxic social media” to clarify what I’m referring to.

> HN makes it quite difficult (technically impossible, but you can link out) to embed media such as videos and pictures, which makes it fundamentally different than "social media".

What’s the difference? Submissions usually include at least one picture, sometimes videos or interactive content.

> HN has surprisingly little AI-generated content in its discussion threads, and links to AI-generated blog posts, etc. tend to get dogpiled on or simply not upvoted and don't get attention.

I’m sorry, but this isn’t true. HN has less AI than say Reddit, and many users try to combat, but I still frequently see top-voted (obvious) AI-generated articles and less frequently comments.

When something has lots of em-dashes and other https://tropes.fyi, I recommend checking on Pangram.

[trollbridge]

Comment threads are not “social media”, no matter how badly anyone wants to redefine that they are. They date back to the 1970s on USENET and mailing lists.

[fluffybucktsnek]

That might imply USENET and mailing lists to be forms or primitive forms of social media.

[andoando]

Why do people argue so hard on semantics? Its social media in some ways and its not in others

[trumpdong]

Why can't those things be social media?

[Atheros]

Because the phrase 'social media' was coined to describe a very specific thing: people who know each other in real life communicating online about things happening to them in real life. There were and are plenty of other words you can use to accurately describe other things, like 'chat room', 'forum', or 'link aggregator'.

[trumpdong]

That's a social network

[talon8635]

The HN comments section certainly feels increasingly hostile, manipulative, manipulated, and jokey. It use to be a reprieve, but it’s feeling more and more like every other comment section online. To me anyways.

[dust-jacket]

see IMO it isn't. HN is an online community. Same as forums, and BBSs were. I don't think they were social media really - they're online spaces that form around a shared interest, where Facebook etc were originally online spaces that augmented a real world community.

But we're a long way from that now.

[liotier]

> HN is an online community. Same as forums, and BBSs were.

That is the very definition of social media.

"Social media I like" vs. "Social media I don't like" isn't valid categorization.

[dust-jacket]

if you think social media just means any space online with multiple people in it, then I guess we just disagree on what social media is.

Is the linux kernel mailing list social media? was usenet?

[close04]

> if you think

What do you think social media is? What are the clear criteria that make something social media, or make it not social media?

If you know HN is not social media that you have a clear demarcation of what is.

[chownie]

Not that user but I don't think this is as difficult as you're making it out to be?

On Reddit, Instagram, Tiktok et al I can create a community on that platform. I can get find other people into Booktok, I can join the Rowing subreddit, I can get into Knittinggram or whatever. Posters expect roughly their micro-community to see their posts, users expect to see their micro-community's posts.

On hacker news I see the same community everyone else does. If HN was a vBulletin forum with threads posted for links it would function almost 1:1 the same, I guess all you'd need to change is a modification for making threads bump on vote behaviour instead of latest-post.

[close04]

TL;DR. If you ask me, the essence of social media today is the algorithm and the "social curation". Is what I see dictated by some behind the scenes algorithm and by the mob (votes, views, engagement, flags, clicks)? It's social media.

But fair enough. Don't forums have subforums for different interests, topics and specific discussions and sub-communities? They have the option to follow other members or topics in a customized consumption experience. In my personal experience on large and small forums, including those I administered or moderated, most users lived their entire life in specific subforums. The user that only posted in the CPU subforum, or the Nikon subforum. The user who created the "photos of flowers" or "case modding" topic and only hung around there with kindred souls in their micro-community. Forums were really reddit at a smaller scale.

> I guess all you'd need to change is a modification for making threads bump on vote behaviour instead of latest-post.

This is downplaying the weight the hidden algorithm has on what you see on HN. Much like every other social media site and very much unlike classic forums, submissions and comments here live and die at the hand of an algorithm that decides whether today you get to read about the Israel/Gaza conflict, about Democrats/Republicans. This algorithm is driven on one hand by the social aspect (people deciding what's media and what isn't, hence the "social"), on the other hand by some obscure engagement rules that none of us can see or define.

I don't make it "seem" more complicated, it "is" more complicated because experts don't fully agree on exactly what social media is. Everyone tries to use their experience, preference, and common sense and these all vary.

P.S. The current top comment isn’t there because it’s the most recent, the only objectively correct one, or a mod pinned it. It’s there because the algorithm driven by social engagement decided it’s the media I should see first.

[Atheros]

Social media is a service where people who know each other in real life communicate mostly about things happening to them personally.

Online Publishing is process by which people, who largely don't know each other in real life, publish their content for others to consume via an online service.

A Link Aggregator is a service where people publish links to outside web services and users vote to establish the ranking on the aggregator.

The only reason any of this is debatable is because old social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter stopped being Social Media and switched to Online Publishing and people are having trouble updating their vocabulary.

[dust-jacket]

I said so above. I think originally they were "online spaces that augmented a real world community". Even twitter, you mostly started by following people you knew or had heard of.

I get that this isn't at all where we are any more. And y'know, everyone's gonna use terms to mean whatever they want. I'm fine with that. I guess I just think its pointless if "social media" means "anything online where people can write messages"

[Barrin92]

>What are the clear criteria that make something social media

I have no idea why people are making some mysterious deep question out of this, wikipedia quite literally offers a definition[1]. Web 2.0 based platforms, user generated content, social networking including social mechanisms such as followers, groups and lists.

This doesn't apply to HN. You could randomly assign everyone a new name tomorrow and it wouldn't matter. Identity is virtually irrelevant here, there are no mechanisms to connect users to each other, there are no networks of people, users do not generate their own content and there is a criterion that what is discussed is of of public, not merely social or personal interest.

If some crash wiped out all HN users tomorrow and we'd all start over at zero almost nothing would change. If that happend on social media, like Instagram, the site would be dead. That's the social part.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media#Definition

[Capricorn2481]

> This doesn't apply to HN. You could randomly assign everyone a new name tomorrow and it wouldn't matter. Identity is virtually irrelevant here

This is wildly untrue. I follow specific people here and I recognize names all the time. It would be super confusing if some of the people I'm interested in hearing from completely different names. And comments are content. I read old threads all the time. If that all went away, a huge part of how I use this site would be gone.

[trumpdong]

So 4chan isn't social media?

[IAmBroom]

That is not what they said. Strawman fallacy, and you still refuse to define the term.

[IAmBroom]

Well, it's A definition, which is more than the opposing side has yet to offer.

I knew someone who described everything he didn't like in politics as "socialism". He literally couldn't define "socialism" when pressed; it was always a circular reference to the current irritant.

[titzer]

You don't see pictures and videos directly on the site. It's text links and text comments and discussions. In the minimal sense of the word, even printed text is media, so it's technically true that HN is social media, but I think it's more like a news aggregator and discussion forum.

[armchairhacker]

How does being text only make it not social media?

Good explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445343

[kelseyfrog]

Because the people who think HN is social media and avoid social media aren't going to see this and respond. It's a selection bias.

[titzer]

> OP: The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

[kelseyfrog]

Maybe take a rest from HN if pedantry is fatiguing?

[kiicia]

HN is public forum (one of the last), it's a bit different thing

[wussboy]

Calling this out as the primary reason HN is not social media. Forums existed for years before social media was ever a thing. HN is indistinguishable from a forum in the early 2000s.

[zerobees]

Forums of the early 2000s were almost always sorted by recency, not upvote count. They also typically weren't dominated by vendor press releases and news stories, whereas domains such as anthropic.com, blog.google, openai.com, along with outlets such as techcrunch.com and arstechnica.com, are probably among the most popular URLs of the past year.

But I don't think it's a meaningful distinction to begin with. Usenet was an endless time sink to get angry at things that didn't matter and argue with strangers who might not even be real people. It wasn't monetized, but it still made it easy to waste years of your life.

[tekla]

Hell no, the forums of the 2000s were "topic that had the last post gets pushed to the top", and pretty much nothing else.

HN has an algorithm that manipulates what you see, and we do not know at all how it works.

[cucumber3732842]

The fact that they intentionally include a rightthing/wrongthink button and keep score is a fundamental difference between modern "social media" and legacy BBSes and forums where there was no score keeping. Perhaps keeping score of rightthink is not enough to make HN social media, but it's certainly enough to not put it in the same bucket as forums and BBSes

[al_borland]

Having some sort of recommendation algorithm seems to also be a defining feature of modern social media, which is something old school forums didn’t have.

[aoshifo]

Of course old forums had score keeping, maybe not on upvote but number of posts, but still

[armchairhacker]

Reddit is a forum, is it not social media?

[mr_mitm]

This comes up often, particularly on Reddit, and I don't think we're doing us any favors by counting it as social media. It has a few substantial differences to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, et al:

- The focus isn't on connecting. It has a "friends" feature (I believe?), but the social graph is extremely weak.

- You are not expected to use your real name. On the contrary, it comes off as weird unless you're a celebrity.

- There is no algorithm maximizing engagement, or at least not a hyper personalized algorithm that analyzes your scrolling speed and every sensor under the sun feeding into a machine learning system designed by professional psychologists to keep you hooked.

- Individuality isn't as encouraged. The user name is small, and there are no avatars, or at least used to be (I don't use the new interface very much). The focus is on the content instead.

I suppose you can find a definition of "social media" that includes Reddit, and surely the differences are fluid, especially since we can recognize some efforts by Reddit to become more like the real social media sites, but I vote for putting it in a different category for the sake of discussion.

[Ldorigo]

Reddit absolutely has algorithmic feeds since it ipo'ed (maybe earlier but I used third party apps so I wasn't subjected to them). 90% of my home page is bullshit I didn't ask for.

[mcmoor]

Yeah there is argument that reddit wasn't social media, but currently is trying to be

[walthamstow]

IMO, the old reddit UI wasn't, but the new one is, since they started the algo home page and showing stuff outside of your subreddits.

[stronglikedan]

> HN is social media

I haven't posted any personal pics, or stories about things that I've done in my life or am currently doing, so how can it be social in the same way that social media is? To me, there's a clear distinction between a news aggregator and discussion forum like HN, and a social media site. Sure, I can post something that I'm working on or a blog post that I've written, but it's still framed as news to be discussed, not a social interaction.

[boomlinde]

> Sure, I can post something that I'm working on or a blog post that I've written, but it's still framed as news to be discussed, not a social interaction.

Discussion is of course a kind of social interaction. You've posted this, which discusses a topic that is only tangentially related to the news item if at all. You can talk about framing all you want, but it ultimately is what it is: spontaneous social interaction between users on the kind of winding paths "unsupervised" discussions naturally take.

I'd be surprised if half of people supposedly discussing the "news to be discussed" have RTFA. That doesn't stop interesting discussion on a wide range of topics from happening here.

It's not "social in the same way", but Twitter and Facebook aren't "social in the same way" either.

[whateveracct]

Forums came before social media. It's a forum.

[haunter]

Forums don’t have algorithmic front page and upvote/downvote system

You can’t bump a thread to the top of HN so everyone sees it

[moffkalast]

No, people just keep reposting the same shit over and over instead. But the end effect is very similar, dang even links to old posts almost every time.

[whateveracct]

I don't think that quite makes it social media though.

[GJim]

> HN is social media.

No!

Social media is where one shares ones social life. It's in the name!

[fl4regun]

by this standard, isn't a public bulletin board even included in the term "social media"?

[sethammons]

Social media started in the early 1500s if we squint with this logic.

Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses were the OG forum post that went viral, and required a printing press.

[anon-3988]

Tell me something that involves other people that isn't a social media then.